To the Right of the Right

A Brahim Bouraam, an Arab immigrant, was thrown into the Seine in Paris amidst a chorus of mockery. Ibrahim Ali, a fellow Arab from the Comoros Islands, was shot to death, pumped full of bullets. In both cases, the misdeeds were carried out by members of the neo-fascist National Front.

To the northeast, in Belgium, while a politician from the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) speaks bitterly of immigration from the South, a young skinhead named Erick hurries to remove a Celtic cross, like the ones worn by the neo-Nazis. When asked by a journalist from Spanish newspaper El Pais, Erick answers, “No, we’re not Nazis; we just want the best for our people, the Flemish – without immigrants.”

It is all about nostalgia for the swastika, the cross of Hitler’s regime. If the Fuhrer’s grudge was against the Jews, the neo-Nazis’ are against immigrants, gypsies, Turks, and... “others.” Curiously enough, democracy is so “advanced” that these groups are represented in their national parliaments. And, moreover, they are a political bloc in the European Parliament!

This became news last week. Far-rightwing MPs in parliament have a sufficient quorum to create a separate caucus with its own identity. On January 9, Tuesday, “ultra-right representatives” signed their charter of principles and sent it to Parliament President Josep Borrell. The document’s character, according to reports, has been described as “broadly anti-immigrant, opposed to the European Constitution and is against Turkey joining the UE.”

On January 15, the group was officially recognized during a plenary session with the name “Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty,” and will have the right to receive funding from the UE just like any of the others bloc in the parliament, such as the Socialists, Greens, etc.

But here is a bit of information and irony: to create this political group in the European Parliament, there must be at least twenty representatives from six different countries. On January 1, with the membership of Rumania and Bulgaria, this condition was met. This occurred despite a vote against the expansion by the Austrian ultra-right organization Freedom Party of Austria (FPO).

Who are the new members of the ensemble? Heading the list is the French National Front, with seven representatives; in second place comes the Great Rumania Party, with five; there are three from the Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, two from Italy’s Social Action and Tricolour Flame, one from FPO, and one British independent.

But names are just names; they can be beautiful and say nothing. To get a better sense of these elements, we will have to know the members of the new tribe.

A PHOTO WITH ADOLF

“I didn’t say the gas chambers never existed, although I haven’t seen them personally, nor have I studied the question in particular. However, I think they are only a detail of the history of the Second World War.”

Gas chambers are a simple “detail” to the head of the National Front, French European representative Jean Marie Le Pen, one of the heads of the new group. This lord of the right, who has gone so far to say that the Nazi occupation of France “was not especially inhuman,” has been taken to court more than once. He was even expelled from the European parliament in 2003 for physically attacking a political opponent.

Some of Le Pen’s other “gems” has been to criticise the French football team for having “too many blacks,” becoming upset when they sang the La Marseillaise, and to say that when AIDS patients “breath air through their pores, they alter the equilibrium of the nation;” this of course is the same way that Hitler sensed handicapped people to be a source of danger!

It freezes ones blood to think that this individual obtained the votes needed to run for office against Jacques Chirac in 2002. Fortunately, the motto “Vote for the thief, not the fascist” mobilized the electorate and the dinosaur was defeated in the second round.

Anther of the “neocons” of the National Front is Bruno Gollnisch, who is supposed to head the caucus. An interesting piece of information is that he is still awaiting a court verdict on his expressing ideas similar to those of Le Pen’s. In October 2004 he opened his mouth to say, “I don’t question the existence of concentration camps, but historians can debate about the number of deaths. As for the existence of gas chambers, it is up to the historians to reach an agreement on the number.” Is there any doubt about the quality of this guy?

Moving north on the map, we find the Belgian organization Vlaams Belang, which is frantically anti-immigrant and supports dividing the country, declaring the independence of Flanders (the Dutch speaking northern part of Belgium) to the detriment of French-speaking Wallonia.

This political organization, which has requested total amnesty for those who collaborated with the Nazi regime, was born out of the ashes of Vlaams Blok, an organization condemned by a court in 2004 for “inciting hatred and discrimination.” Its members then dissolved the organization to set up Vlaams Belang, a rearrangement described by the Belgian security services as a “cosmetic operation.”

One of its MPs, Koenraad Dillen, was at the center of a scandal in 1995, when it was learned that in 1992 he had visited Leon Degrelle, a fascist who collaborated with the Waffen-SS during the Second World War. If this was not enough, Dillen had in his living room a photo signed by Degrelle in which he appears sporting a uniform of the SS while being congratulated by Hitler himself. Is this something about which this democrat is proud!

And among the most colorful figures of this troop is the distinguished Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of you know who. The last name, in this case, is not the problem, but her track record: Alessandra, an ex-porno star and cover-girl on two Playboy editions (in 1983, in 2003), founded her own party —Social Action— after abandoning the ultra-right National Alliance. She left because one of its members, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Gianfranco Fini, supposedly said “fascism was an absolute evil.”

That sounded like an insult to the granddaughter of Il Duce, so she broke with them. Nonetheless, she is a “legitimate” representative in the European Parliament, where she is part of the Justice and Social Liberties Committee. In addition to this she is an honor member of the Italian Red Cross.

She is almost an angel, no?

NEITHER GYPSIES, TURKS OR ANYONE ELSE

The war chest of the recalcitrants has now been enriched with the emergence of the Rumanian and Bulgarian ultra-right representatives. In the case of the Rumanians, their five representatives belong to Great Rumania, a party which is characterized by its extremist nationalism, its deep hatred against gypsy and Hungarian minorities, and its unconcealed desire to annex the neighboring Republic of Moldova – an ex-Soviet territory which is currently an independent state.

Their leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, as early as 2003 said he would not fight against the Jewish people and that he had become a philo-Semite. Likewise, he said he was “wrong for having denied the holocaust in Rumania, which took place from 1941 to 1944 under the regime of (Ion) Antonescu.” The dictator has killed between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews and more than 10,000 Gypsies. And it was just yesterday, as people say, that Tudor figured it out!

A short time later, an ex-advisor denied his strange “conversion.”

Finally, there is the Bulgarian legislator Dimitar Stoyanov, who the president of the community legislature wanted thrown out. What was the motive? Learning about the possibility of electing the Hungarian Gypsy Livia Jaroka as a parliamentarian in 2006, he circulated an e-mail that read: “In my country there are thousands of Gypsy girls more beautiful than this honorable woman. In fact, if you are at the right time and place, you can even buy one —a 12 or 13 year-old— to be your beloved wife.”

The elegant Euro deputy is proud of children prostitution in his country, and also utters his racist tones against the gypsies. This is not a surprise since the leader of his Ataka party, Volen Siderov, has repeatedly accused all the people belonging to this ethnic group of putting “gypsy fear” into practice against Bulgarians, under the supposedly conspiratorial eye of the state.

The racist implications are very rampant in those preaching. And the young Stoyanov will have the opportunity to repeat them frequently in the halls of Strasbourg.

If you look at the web site of the European Parliament you will see that, among the requirements to be elected deputy is being of legal age and “be a citizen of a member state and to meet the requirements of residence defined by the electoral law of the state.”

However, there is no section specifying that those who support xenophobic practices, incite discrimination against minorities, and admire or minimize Nazi crimes, are not allowed to enter the EU.

It seems that this matter is left to the consideration of national laws. Because of this we are witnessing the great paradox of this bloc within the community. While the UE professes to “guarantee that its citizens can live in peace, liberty and prosperity,” it also allows into decision-making positions supporters of the most notorious criminals in history and agitators of violence against minorities.

Is this positive for Europe? Is it an example of its “tolerance” and its “respect for diversity?”